Quite a lot depends on the speed of your machine. Given that you are not running the latest version of iMovie (the last iMovie to call itself "HD" was version 6 and the most recent version of iMovie is version 7), I suspect that your experience is not out of line for your hardware.
I think that iMovie HD 5.0 was current for PowerPC macs mostly running at less than 1 GHz, and I recall that for them, some tasks had to be set up to work overnight. If your Mac will support it, try using iMovie HD 6 (which has a design similar to iMovie HD 5) or even iMovie 7 (radically redesigned) to see if they are better optimized. Apple made iMovie HD 6 a free download because many users were disgruntled with the redesign of iMovie 7.
I was trying to work on some clips I just imported, & immediately got a "Letterboxing-This may take awhile" message. It's been doing that for 3 hours now. I assume this is because I shot the video in 16:9 aspect, but does it really take that long (about 30 minutes of video total)? tia.
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